Snowy (and Sooty) Days

It's been a bit of a strange week really.  The week was going fine.  I'd finally managed to get some headway with my termly plans (difficult to do when your year group doesn't have a termly plan), when at 9.30 on Thursday, the workers building our extension cut the power cables to the secondary school.  On one of the coldest days of the year so far, secondary were left without heat, lights, anything, and no canteen.  95% of all students and staff eat at the canteen, so not OK.  They had to close the school.  It was about 1.30 by the time we were able to leave, and we headed straight to the pub for lunch.  It ended up being quite a fun afternoon.

The problem was that the power was still not fixed properly (no canteen still) until 9.30am on Friday, so we got up as normal on Friday at 6, and then got a call at 6.15 saying that the school was closed!  Teachers had to set work online, so I think the school are hoping not to have to do a make up day - which would be on a weekend or bank holiday.

It was doing some serious snowing by this point too!

So, we ended up having a lazy day - I watched you tube videos about photography, and Matt went to his friends house for lunch.  Then we were out for dinner at our friends who live opposite us.  They were meant to come over to our flat for dinner and to help plan our American road trip in the summer (they are American, and have done this route several times), but Andy is so allergic to the cats that he can't be even close to our flat!  So, Matt made fajitas and we took them over to their flat instead.  Becky made an amazing peanut butter chocolate cake too.  We planned a whole route out, all the stops along the way and how long it would take.  We were in for some serious driving - 9 hour driving days sometimes.  So on Saturday, we changed the entire plan - instead of going in a circle, we are going down and back up the western coast.  Still some very long driving days, but with 3 night stopovers in between rather than 1 night stop overs.  Much more manageable for us Brits, who consider a 5 hour drive to be a full day of driving (our friends drive for about 15 hours and consider that a full day of driving)  Then again, America is gigantic compared to the UK.

After 6 attempts, we have finally settled on a route, and today we started booking hotels, motels, and even an RV with a hot tub for a couple of nights.  So exciting!  It's easy to forget that Sri Lanka is only in a couple of weeks!

On Saturday, I went to pick up my zoom lens, which is now fixed! Yay!  Perfect, in time for safari.

And our fabulous stool arrived from the DTL furniture shop that I went to a couple of weeks ago.  I LOVE it!

Today, the snow has pretty much gone, and the power is all fixed, so school is definitely on tomorrow.  Only 2 weeks until the Lunar New Year holiday though, so not long to go.

Today, we went for lunch at our friends house.  He made two delicious curries from scratch including homemade naan bread, and Louise made cinnamon rolls.  They are such good cooks! We provided the beer and wine!  It was a lovely afternoon.  It's been a nice (unexpected) long weekend.

Fog, Brunch and Cow Femurs

Now, doesn't that already sound like a much more interesting week than last week!  This week has been a hundred times better - I think that last week was probably the hardest one we have had since moving abroad 3 and a half years ago.  I guess you have to experience the lows of living abroad to get the most out of the highs.  This week has had several highs, despite the weather being absolutely foul.  The pollution has been awful.  The above photo is actually fog though, not pollution.  This is our complex, on our way into school on Tuesday.  It was a really dry fog - so bizarre. It was so interesting that I scrapped my morning year 4 grammar lesson in favor of getting the kids to write about the fog - turns out that they are pretty rubbish at spontaneous writing, so that was good to know!

On Wednesday, I led the Year 4 provocation for this terms topic 'ancient civilizations'.  The plan was to run 3 sessions of about 15 minutes each (2 classes at a time), who would come out to my 'dig site', have a look at the artefacts I had found, and I would discover this wonderfully smelly cow femur while they were watching me dig.  It was so much fun!  This job really is great sometimes.  The kids (and teachers) absolutely loved it. Well, most of them.  One child asked why we keep lying to them! Haha!  He was not impressed.  They all had some wild theories about unicorn bones and dinosaur bones.  I ended up scrapping my class directly after this session because all the kids wanted to do was ask me questions about archaeology.  That was fine.  I just went with it - they are a transitional class, so as long as they are using English it is helping them improve their language. Sometimes, they don't even realise it is a planned lesson!  Our lesson went from discussing the dig, to talking about shipwreck archaeology, to how many people die each year of shark attacks.  I really love my job sometimes.

On Saturday, Matt and I went out for brunch to a place called the Bull and Claw, which we have been to before - they do an excellent bubble&squeak.  Delicious.  I am giving myself 2 cheat days from my not-drinking schedule between new year's day and the day we go to Sri Lanka.  Saturday was one of those days, and we have another brunch in 2 weeks.  You can't really do brunch without doing the free-flow prosecco. It's just part of the Shanghai brunch culture!

The pictures have come out in a funny order... so back to Thursday.  My office had organised a night at a furniture warehouse.  They put these nights on a couple of times a year - there is wine, snacks, gift bags, and 2 hours of shopping for fabulous Chinese-style furniture.  In the end I settled on a duck-egg blue ceramic stool decorated with flowers.  It's beautiful.  It's not been delivered yet - hopefully Monday or Tuesday.  We will definitely have to make use of our shipping allowance when we leave.

Today has been an enjoyable cat-cuddle day.  Here are a few photos of our gorgeous fluff-balls...

First Week Back

I think this has been one of those disastrous weeks that you just have to accept is not going to get better and try to move on when Monday comes around.  It was always going to be tough what with it being the first week back after the Christmas holidays.  We only arrived back on Friday, so still had jet lag to contend with come Monday morning.

Lots of my classes have been moved around - my year 5 class was split in half because of the differences in English skills - two went to a new class, with 3 other children, which I am really enjoying teaching.  They are a fun group.  The other lad from the original group has been stuck in with a brand new boy who speaks absolutely no English at all.  The original lads English is pretty good, but not good enough to go up to the next group, so now I have a class with 2 children with completely different English levels. Impossible to teach!  Boring for one, really hard for the other.  Nightmare.  The plan next week is to try teaching them together for 2 lessons, and separately for 2 lessons per week. We will see how it goes.  A tricky one though.

At lunch time on Monday, Matt managed to throw out his back and had to go home.  He ended up being signed off for the whole week, and has had to go in for physio several times. He is back in tomorrow, but it was a really tough week for him. He couldn't even move for 2 days at all.

Yesterday, we went out for a couple of hours to an enormous, 3 story building, full of camera shops. That was fun wandering around, and I bought a monopod, which will be useful for Sri Lanka, when we go on safari.  I took my zoom lens to someone who had been recommended, to see if she could fix it.  She has the lens now, saying it will be a couple of days, but only £20 to fix, which is great.  Matt and I went for a coffee afterwards in Starbucks.  I realised about an hour after we left that I had left my phone on the coffee table, went all the way back, waited for 45 minutes for the manager (who luckily spoke English) to find CCTV, and then had to watch a video of an old man, watching us leave the table, then go straight over and steal my phone.  I was quite upset on the train back.  A stranger asked if I was OK, and if he could help me, and that was the thing that pushed me over the edge when I got home - someone being nice to me!  We spent the rest of the day getting a new SIM card (same number though) and a new phone.  The Chinese are very efficient when it comes to things like this - from theft to being completely set up with the same number in half a day - pretty impressive.

This morning we went to the gym.  Matt managed to go some gentle exercise, which is great - he is improving a lot.

So, not a brilliant week really.  But looking forward, next week can't possibly be worse!

Happy New Year 2018!

It's 2018!  A year that promises some really good things, including 3 completely awesome holidays (Sri Lanka, USA and Vietnam), and 3 sets of family visitors to China.  Exciting times.

Matt and I are now back in China, trying to settle back in before school starts tomorrow.  We are struggling with the jet-lag, and it doesn't help that I am feeling quite unwell.  I hurt my arm dragging my very heavy 2 suitcases across London during rush hour to get to the airport, and now have sharp pain all down my right arm and the right side of my back, that ibuprofen doesn't seem to be touching.  I also have the standard, post aeroplane-pre school sore throat, and am slowly losing my voice.  So a bit of a disaster really since we got back.  The cats have helped - they, especially Snowball, are being very clingy, needing to be close by at all times.  Sooty is even now sitting on my lap as I type - he never sits on us, so he must really have missed us!  They are such cute little creatures - we missed them too.

The week after Christmas flew by, as it always does when you're enjoying yourself.  My week was filled with walks in the forest (the ice-y photos - we had such fun crunching the ice.  Such a satisfying noise)...

Boxing day was spent at Nanny's house, eating bubble and squeak - my favourite meal in the world.  It's even better than Christmas lunch!  It was a lovely day catching up.

On New Year's Eve, I took the train to Matt's parents for the usual party.  It was great fun, as always.  Our friend Andy was visiting from Newcastle, and it was great to see him.  Matt's cousin's new puppy Buddy was there too.  He's so cute!

I was meant to meet my friend Annmarie for ice skating in Winchester one day, but unfortunately she was unwell and couldn't come.  This was a real shame, as she lives in America, and I don't get to see her very often.  Still, we shall visit her when we are in California in the summer.  Instead of the tickets going to waste, Mum said she would skate with me.  We ended up really enjoying ourselves - Mum is much better at skating than me, but neither of us fell over, which was good since it was very busy!  Dad was the official photographer.

Matt had a nice day out in London with his family, then a few days of relaxing while they all went back to work.

On my last day at home we went to Christchurch, one of my favourite places, for a walk and lunch.  There had been so much rain that the water was really high.  It was very cold!

I left for the airport on Thursday for a 9.30pm flight, not realising that it would take me through the centre of London at rush hour!  Not fun.  But still, I met up with Matt fine, and we were soon on our way.  We both managed to sleep for most of the flight - the first time I've been long haul and not needed to watch a film. We made it home by 6pm on Friday to be greeted by the lovely cats.  They love their Christmas presents!

School tomorrow, and hopefully we will both be feeling a bit better - Matt's back has just gone.  We are exhausted, but it will be good to see the kids again.